• new this month
• coming soon
• arts
• biographies
• classics
• classic poetry
• cookbooks
• fiction
• food writing
• history
• poetry
• nature guides
• travel guides
• travel writing
|
 |
|
The Hakawati
“Here is absolute beauty. One of the finest novels I’ve read in years.” —Junot Diaz
In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father’s deathbed. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them: gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories.
Osama’s grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching stories—of his arrival in Lebanon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he earned the name al-Kharrat, the fibster—are interwoven with classic tales of the Middle East, stunningly reimagined. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the ancient, fabled Fatima; and Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders. Here, too, are contemporary Lebanese whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war—and of survival.
Like a true hakawati, Rabih Alameddine has given us an Arabian Nights for this century—a funny, captivating novel that enchants and dazzles from its very first lines: “Listen. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.”
Read an Excerpt
Meet Rabih Alameddine
Visit Rabih Alameddine’s web site
Buy the Book
(link to this item)
Back to Knopf main page
|
|
|
|
|
 |
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
September 2007
|